As someone involved in the " medical anti-ageing industry", perhaps I can give you all some tips.
First... brain ageing...
There has been some amazing research recently into the effects of, would you believe, berries on the processes of brain ageing.
The clear winner is the humble blueberry. Researchers supplemented the diets of rats with blueberries and found some startling effects. Memory increased, curiosity increased, agility increased, the ability to cope with a changing environment improved and... and here was the real surprise, the rats actually grew new brain cells... lots of them. The really interesting part was that the rats on blueberries in the last third of their lives (the time equivalent to humans over 60) outperformed the control rats (that is, those not on bluberries) in the first third of their lives, when those rats should have been at their mental and physical peak.
When they extended the reseach to humans who had early stage alzheimers, they found a remarkable improvement on just half a cup of berries a day.
Second... ageing as a disease...
The anti-ageing profession looks at ageing as the cumulative symptoms of a number of related diseases. This is a paradigm shift that much of the medical fraternity is slow to embrace, but there has been a marked difference in mainstream medical attitudes over the last four or five years.
For instance, it's not too long ago that med students used to be taught that diet and nutrition had no role to play in the prevention of disease. Hard to believe huh?
The causes of ageing appear to fall into four main categories, hormones, oxidation, inflammation and genes.
As we age, our hormone production across all major hormone groups declines, and at up to 15% per decade. That means that if you're in your mid forties, your hormone levels are depleted by more than 30%. By your late fifties, you're down to around 50%, and the decline gets faster from there.
Hormones? Yes, and there's a long list... Human Growth Hormone, DHEA, Pregnenalone, Melatonin, Testosterone, Oestrogen, Progesterone and a whole raft of others.
By restoring these hormones to the levels of, say, your mid thirties, you will restore vitality, shed weight, increase muscle mass, reduce your risk of heart attack and stroke, and reduce the risk of diabetes.
This isn't urban myth, or science fiction. It's real, heavily researched medicine being practiced by a growing number of mainstream doctors all over the world... BUT... you need to do it in balance. Just rushing off to your local drug store isn't going to help that much.
Medically, it's the same logic as treating diabetes (which is caused by an impaired insulin regulation and production mechanism) by giving a patient insulin.
And oxidation? Do you mean we rust? Yes... sort of.
The very process that keeps us alive, that is the burning of oxygen to provide cellular energy, is the same proces that causes us to age. The so-called anti-oxidants really do perform a vital role in keeping you alive. There are lots of them... and one of the most powerful is melatonin, a hormone that, yes, declines with age just like all the rest. A part of the reason blueberries might protect brains may lie in their high value as anti-oxidant food.
If you supplement your diet with a broad range of anti-oxidant foods, you'll be preventing some of the damage that we associate with ageing.
Now if you think that just by eating right, you will get all the right nitrition, and hence all the anti-oxidants you need, you'd be very wrong indeed. Modern farming practices, and depletion of soils has meant a quantifiable decline in the nutritional value of key foods over the last 50 years. In fact, in a study published by the American College of Nutrition, researchers looked at measures of nutritional values for 43 key garden crops in 1999, and compared them with the same crop values published in 1950. In some cases, the nutritional content had dropped by 36%!
The moral of that is that if you're not taking balanced nutritional supplements, then start.
Then there's the new kid on the block, inflammation. The more we look, the more we're coming to understand that some of the symptoms we now associate with ageing may be cased by chronic low level inflammation.
For example, it is just possible that our hormone levels decline because the capilliaries that carry blood to the glands that secrete them may be inflamed, thereby reducing the flow of blood, which in turn depresses production.
The bottom line is this... there isn't a person reading this who should not be taking at least 2grams of high quality fish oil every day (that's usually two gel caps). Fish oil is a superb natural anti-inflammatory, and the list of diseases/conditions that fish oil helps would fill a telephone book. In fact, it would be easier to write a list of diseases fish oil didn't help.
Finally, there are genes. It appears that, for now, no matter how healthy the hormone modulation, anti-oxidants, fish oil and nutritional supplements keep us, we have a genetic use-by date. In humans, that looks to be around 110-115 years of age.
So... is ageing a treatable disease? Yes, and no. Yes, in that the primary goal of research right now is to stop that long, slow, debilitating decline in physical and mental function that we currently associate with "getting old". And, depending on how much money you've got, we can be relatively successful at that. We're all still going to die, but changes in thinking within the medical profession over the next 20 years will mean that for many of us, death will come while we're hang gliding, mountain climbing or scuba diving at age 97.
For more reading, I recommend the Life Entension Foundation website at
www.lef.org, and the website of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (or A4M, which is the doctors' professional association that certifies anti-aging medical specialists) at
www.worldhealth.net.
